A Review of Zadie Smith’s “Grand Union”
Not So Grand
“Plot is not my strong point.” — Zadie Smith
I have to admit that I have some jealousy for Zadie Smith. She wrote her first novel, White Teeth, while she was still in her teens if memory serves correct. (Wikipedia was of little help to clarify this point.) So my jealousy is two-fold: one, the book went on to win some awards, which invokes my jealousy for being such a finely written book. Two, it has been said that, in publication circles, being the age of 35 and publishing your first novel at that age makes you practically an infant in publishing years, which again invokes my jealousy in Zadie Smith for being published so young, practically a zygote. Now that Zadie Smith is almost 44 years old — she was born just scant weeks after me — I wanted to check in and see if she’s still turning in fantastic books. With her short story collection, Grand Union, the answer is, alas, no.
Perhaps the short story format eludes her, but the vast majority of the stories in this collection go nowhere fast — they are academically-toned for the sole purpose of being studied in universities, and are experimental for the sake of being experimental. That’s not to say that I’m dissatisfied or unhappy that a book such as Grand Union exists. Zadie Smith is a woman of colour, and we desperately need intelligent, highly rendered books written by women of colour like you wouldn’t believe. However, Smith falls into the same traps as fellow woman of colour author Dionne Brand in her latest book, Theory. Smith, like Brand, writes high above the heads of the hoi polloi and, in the former’s case, infuses her stories with philosophical digressions that quickly go … well, you know where and how quickly.
And that’s when Smith isn’t entirely guh-rossing you out. In her story “Sentimental Education,” which is one of the pieces that open the collection, there’s a scene with a black man wiping his penis off with shit after having anal sex with his girlfriend. Ew! I suppose there’s a subtext because Smith loves subtexts, and I suppose this has to do with the character wanting to be white or something. I don’t know. I was too busy trying not to throw up in my mouth. Later on, in the same story, one character uses her teeth to dislodge a tampon embedded in another female character. Double ew! I’m not sure what the point of that was, aside from the fact to make the story a little more Low Art than the High Lit it aspires to also be.
That’s not to say that there are decent stories in this collection when Smith stops trying to be so pretentious. The collection’s centerpiece, “Big Week,” is a compelling story about a Boston man trying to get his life back together after it has hit rock bottom due to substance abuse issues. However, it simply just runs out of gas and … ends. It is as though Smith were trying to write a novel and quickly got bored and simply abandoned the piece, which is a shame as it is the best story in the collection by far, and caught my interest in the same way that White Teeth did. A story that follows, “Meet the President!,” is also interesting as it is set in an augmented reality with a teenager playing a first-person shooter while he’s been led along to someone’s funeral. However, stories such as these are too far too few. Instead, we get faceless stories that are about a whole pile of nothing. One of the stories, features a drag queen but doesn’t reveal that he’s a drag queen until halfway into the story! What a cheat!
Overall, I’m not very impressed with this story collection. Again, it serves to illustrate that perhaps Zadie Smith is better at the longer form of the novel — though my only experience with Smith’s novel work is, again, with White Teeth. I’m also not sure what the need is for a physical collection of short stories, as it appears that quite a few of them are available online at the websites of the publications that originally published them. In short, Grand Union is simply shelf filler. Buy it to show all of your friends that you’ve read a Very Important Author if you must, but don’t actually read it. The time spent reading it will be wasted minutes, outside of the handful of stories that I mentioned that are somewhat passable at least.
Zadie Smith may no longer be the twenty-something wunderkind that she once was if this collection is any indication. Something has happened to her writing. While she’s pushing herself in novel and not-so-obvious ways, the end result is not very readable. If you’re looking for a book to entertain you, Grand Union is not that kind of book. It strives to be thoughtful and say Big Things about the state of humanity, but trips itself up by not having much of a linear plot to follow in most of these pieces, save for “Big Week” and “Meet the President!” Zadie Smith writes best when she plainly has a plot in sight and has something to say with the confines of that. Take that away and all you’re left with is bafflegab. Alas, Grand Union has too much of this. For instance, there’s a story about 9/11 called “Escape from New York” that serves no purpose than to get its characters out of the city to safety. The End. No point, no moral. If anything, Grand Union will serve to remind you just how good White Teeth was. If that’s the case, then re-read White Teeth again and take a pass on this. Grand Union is below middling at best, and a surprise to someone who once thought that a young Zadie Smith could once take on the world, which, through her writing, Smith seems no more capable of doing.
Zadie Smith’s Grand Union will be published by Penguin Random House Canada / Hamish Hamilton on October 8, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
